Subj : To RAID or not to RAID?
To   : Angus Mcleod
From : Belly
Date : Mon Aug 16 2004 05:46 pm

  Re: To RAID or not to RAID?
  By: Angus Mcleod to All on Sun Aug 15 2004 10:56 pm

 > Do I actually want to configure the drives as a RAID array?  Or do I simply
 > have two partitions and periodically snapshot/copy one to the other?  Thing 
 > I won't be _eriting_ to the array that often.  I might be _reading_ data off
 > the array all day as I listen to music, but I won't be _writing_ to the arra
 > other than when I acquire a new album, which certainly isn't every/all day.
 > 
 > So is there any advantage to configuring two separate partitions and adding 
 > copy to partition #2 as part of the usual rip/encode/dbinsert process?  I'm
 > thinking you could spin down one disk and run only one and at some time you
 > could spin up the second disk, unmount/mount and spin down the first disk so
 > to spread the wear'n'tear.  Make the changeover a cron-job at 5:30 AM, & may
 > an MD5 comparison of all disk objects so as to spot any differences that nee
 > to be eliminated.
 > 
 > Or should I use plain old RAID?  

Pros and cons to each...

RAID: easy backup in case of drive failure, no maintenance (file copying)
required... but if you accidentally rm -rf then both copies are gone. in most
RAID setups you also gain throughput over a single drive also... this is really
not an issue in a server used by a single user, though.

Seperate copies: recovery possible from accidental deletion/corruption... you
have to synchronize the files occasionally, but that can be done via cron jobs
and scripts. If you do this, I recommend using rsync... it it made to sync over
networks, but you can use it locally. works great.

My home network spans 4 houses on the street... I guess that's a Neighborhood
Area Network? :) Anyway, we used a nightly rsync running from cron to
synchronize MP3s between servers in diferent houses for backup purposes...
Worked well. It took a while to get the initial 80GB sync finished, but after
that only changes are transmitted.

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   BeLLy
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